Among the products currently available on the market for the tracking of surface water masses through GPS trackers, the following devices can be mentioned: buoy MD02 of the company Albatros Marine Technologies, buoy SVP and Microstar models of the company Pacific Gyre, buoys of the series SVP of the Metocean company, buoy TRBUOY of the Marexi company, buoy MLi of the Marine Instruments company, buoy ClearSat-1 of the Clearwater company and buoy ArgoDrifter of the Technocean company. In addition, noncommercial models are (or were) available (Austin et al., 2004, Gutiérrez et al. 2009), which were built for own use, with no commercial purposes.
These devices are mainly used to characterize the Langragian dynamics of a water mass. Among other applications, this is especially useful to generate databanks to feed and/or validate computational fluid dynamics models (Salman et al. 2006), to perform calibration/validation of radar HF stations for the surface currents measurements (Ohlmann et al. 2006) and to track discharges on the sea (Goodman et al. 1995).
There are also other floating devices used for different purposes, but whose geometry can be considered the closest state of the art to the present disclosure. This is the case of the floats of the rescue lights.
Regarding the design, the major requirements are the device to be able to track effectively the movement of the water parcel in which it is immersed and send regularly its position to a remote server. In this sense, there is a large number of references that allow to understand how the design and construction of these devices must be accomplished to guarantee the fulfillment of this requirements (Chereskin et al. 1989, Kirwan et al. 1975 and 1978, Niiler et al. 1987 and 1995, Ohlman et al. 2005, Sybrandy et al. 2009) and how the devices must be validated and/or calibrated in the field (Gasser et al. 2001, Geyer et al. 1989).
Regarding the remote management and operation of these devices, the only known document on the state of the art to manage and operate this kind of device is the English version of the MD02 buoy user manual, which contains much more information than its Spanish counterpart.
In addition, other objects, desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent summary and detailed description, and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background.